Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

I personally think that Gnome as a project has had some serious problems and issues right from the beginning. It started as a way to troll KDE project (excuse me for the lack of better way to express how Gnome founders wanted completely GPL-safe and compatible desktop. I remember how Qt wasn't entirely safe to use back then).

Then they made a descent desktop which had some design issues and limitations due the use of widget set not meant for the complete desktop usage. Their objective of having complete C desktop was also pretty ridiculous in a modern desktop design. UNIX families of OSes didn't have a common desktop in the first place and only thing that came even close to being that standard was CDE which should have been the staring point of the design instead of copying Windows 9X series of desktops.

Then the Gnome project actually managed to produce completely different desktop environment which still had some serious design issues but at least it was functional albeit it had some serious bugs. And Nautilus was the worst file manager I had ever laid my hands on (yes, even worse than the Mac OSes "F*" Finder). Midnight Commander was and still is a master piece I still use since it works. Gnome 2 is where the design shift was made towards copying the OS X and they actually managed to take the relevant parts in in a series of well refining releases making Gnome 2 very popular desktop. But that didn't hide all the issues it had underneath in technical wise.

Gnome 3 steps in here. It's technically very very good desktop. I've had some time playing around with it and testing some of the frameworks and I like it. But Gnome 3 desktop designers went too much into OS X's closed direction and didn't quite understand how to build a functionality into it and opted not to hide it (like Apple does) but completely remove it from the visible eyes. That has alienated tons of Gnome 2 users completely and made them KDE or XFCE users.

KDE has also some serious issues being wanna be windows desktop environment. Their biggest problem is probably the fact that they're not trying to hide any functionality at all. KDE as a desktop is f* cool but at the same time it makes no sense at times. I have to admit thought that I use KDE and I've been using KDE since the KDE 2 was out. And I like Qt. But I hope I'm not labeled as a fanboy. I do like both Gnome and KDE but KDE is my first choice because it's flexible. Gnome is inflexible and that's how it meant to be. The Very inflexibility of Gnome made it popular and now it has made it not so popular.

I could start a story about Gnome project management issues but this short outburst is already starting to get out of hands...